My Republican friend, veteran political operative Joe Redstate, has been hard to reach lately, because the opening round of the Presidential election season is nearly underway in his adopted home state of Iowa. He surprised me by Skyping me. He looked exhausted, but he was extremely excited that Doctor Ben Carson is currently leading the polls in America's heartland.

"Carson is the kind of candidate Iowa Republicans can get behind," he said excitedly. "Trump still has a lot of support here, but Carson realized early on that the only way to surge in front of the Donald was to outflank him on the mental spectrum."

Sounds like you're saying he's even loonier than Trump.

"That plays in Iowa, man. Remember, ﻿Rick Santorum﻿won here in '12. Dr. Carson got off to a great start by saying Obamacare was the worst thing that had happened to America since slavery."

Well, there was the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and 9-11. And Dick Cheney was only a heartbeat away from the Presidency for eight long years. All those things were pretty bad.

You know the Constitution says that no religious test should ever be required for public office, Joe. Besides that, there are no Muslims running for President on either side.

"Don't lecture me about the Constitution, pal. Republicans know the Constitution is just like the Bible—it says exactly what we want it to say. And Republicans specialize in being afraid of things that are never going to happen—the government taking away all our guns, Sharia law in Oklahoma, FEMA death camps, everybody being forced to drive a Prius. A Muslim President is just something else to add to that list. Carson is a political genius, and he proved it once and for all when he said there would never have been a Holocaust if Jews had had guns."

You know the Nazis ran roughshod over people who had plenty of guns, Joe. The French and Polish armies come to mind.

"Stupid example. You know France and Poland combined couldn't win a war against the Bahamas. Look at Israel. Jews with guns! When was the last time Israel lost a war?"

Roughly two thousand years ago, I believe. But it was to the Romans, the Nazis of the ancient world.

The evening news was on the other night and besides the car wrecks, fires and guilty verdicts, the news anchor solemnly related the story of four high school students who accidentally ingested a marijuana-laced brownie and were ﻿rushed to the local hospital for emergency treatment.﻿

This set me to wondering—how does one treat an accidental pot high? I think it would be irresponsible to give victims more drugs. They might like what the hospital had in its medicine cabinet even better than unforeseen pot buzz they were experiencing, and marijuana's reputation as a gateway drug would only get larger. I called a medical professional I know, Dr. Mary Jane Sativa, and posed the question to her.

"We're always ready to treat patients who have accidentally ingested marijuana," she replied briskly. "Our facility is located a half-block from a twenty-four hour Jack In The Box. Our first step in stabilizing these unfortunates is usually to order at least twelve tacos for each of them."

Is a dozen usually enough?

"Usually, but in really serious overdose cases, they might require a jumbo order of curly fries as well."

What if the accidental pot victim finds himself too stoned too get to the hospital? Should he or she call an ambulance?"

"Sure. For one thing, getting strapped on a gurney and riding backwards at high speed to the emergency ward is a real rush. But if you want to try treating the patient or patients at home, all you really need is a bag of Doritos the size of a clothes hamper and a five-gallon bucket of some jalapeno cheese substance. If you don't have Doritos, Ruffles may be substituted, provide you have enough onion soup mix and sour cream to make dip. Avoid Funyuns."

"Then, whether the victim is at home or hospitalized, put on a movie that is nothing but one punch line after the other. Police Academy or Airplane! are both excellent choices. Avoid any Scary Movies after number three. Younger victims may be more suitably treated by a course of YouTube fail videos, while foreigners may enjoy Monty Python or Benny Hill. When the victim is laughing so hard that he or she is weeping and unable to articulate an answer to the question "What is so freaking funny?" they are well on the way to recovery. The only danger at this point is abdominal disruption caused by excessive humor, or, as you laymen put it, "busting a gut." After a nice nap, the patient is ready to be discharged."

We've all seen those quizzes on the Internet that purport to tell their takers how liberal or conservative they are, if they are too stupid to figure it out for themselves. Anybody can put one of those tests together and try to make money off of it is what I think, so I've done my own, and as a bonus, it will also reveal how many black friends you have and how many guns you own. Go ahead! Take the test!

What is our biggest domestic problem?

Income inequality

Gun violence

Price of cable TV keeps going up

Obamacare

Walmart smiley face has gone bilingual

What is our biggest international problem?

Controlling carbon emissions so we don't roast the planet

Spurring economic growth in the Third World so they don't rise up and kill us

Russia

Isis

There are still foreigners out there that are not afraid that if they diss us, we'll kick the shit out of them, every time. We need to find them and kick the shit out of them.

Who would be on your ideal Presidential ticket?

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren

Third term for Obama and Biden!

Hillary and Bill Clinton

Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina, after she's had some work done so she looks more like a President and less like a Triple Crown winner

The all-Ted ticket—Cruz and Nugent!

How would you describe the current state of race relations in the US?

Bad, and it's all a result of out terrifying history of slavery and segregation

Improving, but we've still got a way to go.

Jay-Z and Beyonce are doing all right. Celebrities are the only black people I ever worry about.

People who marry interracially need to think about their children

Bad, and it's all on account of Obama

What store have you shopped at most frequently in the last week?

Whole Foods

Safeway

7-Eleven

Walmart

Slick's Liquor and Ammo

What answer closely describes your reaction to seeing an attractive unclothed member of the opposite sex on the Internet?

Another sad example of the objectification that saturates our shameless media

Nice!

Is this a whole slideshow?

Sis!

Mom!

What do you do on a typical Sunday?

Rescue dogs

Get outside and enjoy nature

Watch football. If it's not football season, watch something else, but wish it was football.

Church

It's all day in the basement shooting range!

Who is your favorite popular musician(s) of all time?

Humpback whales

The Ramones

Jay Z and Beyonce

Merle Haggard

Dethklok

What's your favorite movie ever?

Citizen Kane, because pretending it doesn't bore the crap out of me is my sacrifice to the Earth Goddess

Groundhog Day

Anything with "Batman," "Spiderman" or "Star Wars" in the title.

Joe Dirt

Any movie with Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal killing people, especially Asians, one after the other from the opening scene to when the credits roll.

What's your favorite book?

Anything by Deepak Chopra or Dr. Oz

Catch-22

Katy Perry's autobiography

Does that include comic books?

Dianetics

SCORING: Give yourself the number that corresponds to the number of the answer you marked for each question. Add them up to get your total.

RESULTS:

10-15—You're an obsessive liberal, a politically correct pain in the ass who annoys everybody you talk to. You're at least a vegetarian, if not a vegan. If you came into possession of a gun, you would immediately give it away to a minority person so they could defend themselves against the police. You don't have any black friends because you are afraid you would inadvertently oppress them.

15-25—You're liberal, but you really don't care what kind of life the chicken in your sandwich had before it was deep-fried and served to you. If you have a good reason to have a gun, you keep it in a locked gun cabinet. You have black friends if you work or live around them.

26-35—You like to think you're a middle-of-the-road moderate, but the truth is you're a People Magazine-reading nincompoop who would probably call a doctor if you ever had an original thought. You have one gun, which you keep in your nightstand. Your kids have black friends. That's close enough for you.

36-45—You're a conservative because all your friends are. You have lost count of the guns you have, but you know you lost at least three when your spouse donated the couch to your church, because there were at least that many stuffed between its cushions. You have black friends if any black people go to the same church as you.

Over 45—You're a sovereign citizen, possibly even an Oath Keeper. Every structure in your compound has an armory and an ammunition depot. You don't have any black friends because you don't want to have to kill your friends when the inevitable race war starts.

I got a 22. That may surprise my critics, but the fact is I really like Dethklok. Feel free to post your own score.

It is now legal to have yourself killed in California. Our Governor Retread signed a bill into law which permits terminally ill people to get a prescription from a doctor which will allow them to jump the turnstile at the Tunnel of Light, so to speak.

Fewer people are leaping at that chance than some of us might like. The only member of the Kardashian and Jenner clans to attempt to kill himself since the bill was passed was one of their husbands, Lamar Odom. The Kardashian-Jenners, in the unlikely event that you are unfamiliar with them, are a closely-related group of mostly young women with an explosive talent for posting pictures of themselves in their underwear on Instagram, and one old guy famous for turning himself into an old woman on TV.

The family has been augmented recently by the coming of age of Kylie and Kendall. Having recently upped their mommie count from one to two hasn't stopped them from being conventionally selfish, rich and nasty.

Now, you may think to yourself, Richard, aren't you being overly optimistic in thinking that this family, living lives of bloated celebrity all, would choose to kill themselves just because it's legal now? Sure, I think they realize that we all feel a little dead inside when we so much as glimpse one of their shows while we're surfing cable channels because that's all we can afford to do instead of buying expensive clothes every day that we can slip out of so we can take butt-selfies and put them on the Internet every night like the born and raised publicity sluts that we are, but do you really think that's motivation enough for them to order a big round of Jerry Brown's Tombstone Tonic shots for themselves?

To that I say, sure there's motivation. R-A-T-I-N-G-S. And we can start off with Caitlyn, nee Bruce, Jenner. This transgendered person was born to kill herself on TV, in my opinion, and I'm sure the rest of the family would be supportive of her decision, especially in light of the fact that she chose to spell her new name with a 'C" instead of a 'K.'

But no. So far only Lamar has decided to try the easy way out, and apparently failed. But I applaud his style. He busted his move towards the Pearly Gates by going to a brothel in Nevada and consuming enough booze, coke, fake Viagra and prostitutes to put himself in a coma. That's the way to go, and when I feel that my personal timer is about to go off, I hope my family understands if I choose to Lamar it out of here.

But Lamar is up and about, although I imagine considerably hung over, and I bet he's ready for his own TV show instead of being a hanger-on in somebody else's. I see it as having a travel angle. "Whorin' Round the World With Lamar Odom" would not be too blunt of a title.

And if we want to keep some of that action in California, we're going to need legal brothels. Governor?

I hit my mother's house near Philly for my annual visit right after it was hit by a tornado. Officially, it was not a tornado, but an insurance adjuster friend of mine said that was because the National Weather Service is in cahoots with the insurance companies, most of whom issue policies that cover tornadoes much more generously than straight line winds.

It sure sounded like a tornado from her description of it. "The whole sky turned orange," she said. "And the noise! You couldn't even hear the branches breaking off the trees, the wind was so loud."

"Why didn't you get in the cellar?" I asked.

"I was trying to close the kitchen window," she said. "The wind was blowing the plates onto the floor, and they were breaking."

Nowhere in any survival guide does it say that the best place to be during a tornado is by an open window near breaking china, but fortunately, both she and the house were spared any damage. Her car was in the shop for three weeks because a good-sized branch fell on it. If you were in her neighborhood, and noticed an eighty-five year old woman ensconced incongruously in a rented Mini Cooper, that is why. All the other damage was limited to trees on her acre-and-a-half property. Most lost several big branches, and some were blown clean in two.

"We planted those trees," she said sadly. "I planted those trees," I corrected her.

I remember the tree-planting process well. The yard lacked trees when I was a boy of eleven or so, and my mother was determined to correct this landscaping flaw. She and my father would have me push a wheelbarrow into the woods behind the house, which time and rising real estate values eventually turned into a subdevelopment, accompanying me for supervision purposes. In their simple pioneer way, they just selected the tree they wanted to swipe and had me dig it up. My father would drink beer and tell me that everything I was doing was wrong, and my mother would do the actual correcting, adjusting the size of the root ball (too big, in my youthful opinion) and the depth of the hole which had to be dug to accommodate it (likewise, too deep).

I would be set to work. The soil in that area is dense with shovel-turning stones. There are more rocks in a square foot of that ground than in the box of them that Ariana Grande is dumber than, but after a half-hour or so of sweaty labor I was usually able to extract the chosen tree and its accompanying dirt ball and the load of Cenozoic-looking insects crawling ookily around in it from the earth, put it in the wheelbarrow and trundle it out of the woods, where it sat until I could excavate another space among the rocks to plunk it into.

I must have planted a dozen of them, all silver maples, at a heavy cost in perspiration and resentment. All of them had gotten fifty or sixty feet tall, and too big to get your arms around if you were inclined to hug them, when they met their fate. I took pictures of the arboreal wreckage and showed them to my brother when we visited him.

"I remember planting those trees," he said.

"No you don't," I replied bitterly. Now that he is a middle aged, rather slow guy, maybe he doesn't think I remember his work habits when he was a lad, but I do. The guy had a natural gift for getting stung by bees. He used it to get out of any exterior chore. Whenever we were set an outdoor job by my parents, whether it was planting a tree or mulching the garden or filling a seemingly bottomless bucket with wild blackberries, he would manage to be stung and get himself excused from it. While I struggled in the thorns and the humidity of the East Coast summer doing his work and mine, he would get a baking-soda poultice for his wound and spend the rest of the day quietly watching whatever he wanted on TV, or, even worse, messing up my bags of toy plastic soldiers or airplanes. Bees were his friends.

He was disabled a few years ago in a work accident, which was, surprisingly, completely unrelated to bee attack, and now doesn't have much of anything to do. He could plant a few trees if he wanted to, but I'm not holding my breath.

The family chainsaw was in the tool shed, which was also covered by fallen branches, and I was forbidden to rent one. There were far too many downed trees for me to make much of an impact on them in a week anyway. Mom had to hire someone to chop them up and remove them.

So mostly I just contemplated their remains. Made me feel like that line in the John Denver song.

A man in Denver was recently arrested for burglary after the DNA in a pair of soiled underpants found at the crime scene was analyzed and ﻿determined to be his﻿.

This CSI moment in the field of poop analysis was no doubt a triumph for both science and law enforcement, and promises that stern justice will be meted out to all weak-bowelled burglars in the future.

The burglar in question, Rodney Mark Hendrix, was already serving time for an unrelated offense when the criminal crap was traced back to him. It took 13 months for the lab results to be returned, no doubt because no one in the lab was overly keen to work with the suspect substance.

The crime took place in a church-school-daycare complex, where Rodney probably thought he had gotten away with stealing over four grand worth of electronic goodies despite soiling himself in the process.

What caused Mr. Hendrix to dirty his drawers remains unknown, although likely it was fear. Did a police siren go off nearby? Did a somnambulistic minister interrupt the crime, causing Hendrix to hide in the rest room where the underwear was found? Did Jesus appear to him, and command him to stop stealing from His church? Because any of those would do it.

Or was it the suspect's simple diet of fast-food tacos and cheap beer that made him criminally irregular?

No one knows. And, speaking of lack of knowledge, frankly, very few of you probably knew that your personal product blossomed with telltale genetic clues to your unique identity. What quantity of waste would be necessary to identify you as a person who consistently forgets to flush in public bathrooms I don't know, but I bet there's more than enough in that log lying in the bowl in that last Quicki-Mart rest room you polluted, you inconsiderate bastard. When the DNA results come back, you're busted.

There may well be enough DNA in a simple skidmark in your tightie-whities to identify you as their owner, and also as a person too slovenly to use bleach.

The question is whether your gaseous waste contains enough DNA to brand you as the farter. If so, I envision a future in which flatus identifying equipment is installed in critical environments, mostly elevators. Strategies employed by the fart prone now, such as staring at the fattest person in the Otis and wrinkling your nose after releasing a stinker, will be revealed for the dishonest gimmicks that they are, and the present crude principle used to detect the individual who has broken wind ("he who smelt it, dealt it") will give way to scientific certainty. In this brave new world, future farters will no doubt just shamefacedly raise their hands rather than wait to be unerringly identified by technology.

Science marches on, and it takes no prisoners. Except for Rodney Hendrix.

If community college students in Oregon were more like this, Roseburg would have never happened

In the aftermath of the most recent mass shooting here in our ammo-loving nation, I had to consult with Wayne LaPierre, head honcho of the NRA, who explained exactly what went wrong in that Oregon classroom.

"Not enough guns. If everybody in the room had been packing heat, that loony would never have dared open fire. To all Americans who still have a majority of their marbles, I say this: Buy a rod and carry it. It only makes sense that if everybody did that, we'd eliminate the problem of gun violence in America."

But what about people who don't want to carry guns? I mean, a good girl with a gun, which I notice you never talk about, can always pack a cute low-caliber automatic in her purse, but what about men? Here in the beneficent climate of San Diego, we Southern California guys often wear nothing but shorts and sandals. Where are we going to conceal our gats?

"The ankle-holster flip-flop. Made for men who want to strap their equalizer in mild climates. Coming to the NRA store soon. Available in a variety of colors, in either standard flops or river sandals, with styles for both left-handed and right-handed draws."

Sounds like it would be kind of heavy. And wouldn't it tend to make you list to one side, especially after a few brews?

"We're talking about public safety here. Make the sacrifice. The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Interesting to hear you say that. ﻿There was a good guy with a gun in Rosebur﻿g. He stayed out of it. He wisely realized that even though he was concealing a permissible chiller, bolting into the middle of an 'active shooter scene,' which, in the charming language of cop-speak, actually refers to a mass murder in progress, would likely result in him getting shot either by the armed loony or the SWAT team sent to flush him out. So he stayed put and kept his chiller in his pocket.

"That guy wasn't a good guy with a gun. He was a sensible guy with a gun. Sensible guys with guns are useless. They start thinking about not getting shot themselves. What you need in places like Roseburg are good guys with guns. These are the guys who don't worry about being mistaken for a deranged gunman, or ﻿being shot by some criminal's accomplice,﻿ because that doesn't happen in their fantasies of omnipotence. They slip their guns in their waistbands every morning dreaming of bulleting a bad guy, becoming a hero, and maybe getting multiple attractive sex partners for it."

And deservedly so. When's that going to happen?

"One of these days, we hope. And when it does, I plan to never shut up about it."

America has long been noted for its abundance of free-range idiots, many of them public figures or holders of elective office. Before baseball games, we all stand with our hands on our hearts and sing that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave, but in those same hearts we secretly know we are the land of the loon and the home of the starkly insane.

People listened to this and said "Ditto!" as they do whenever Rush speaks. These solid thinkers know that water on Mars greatly increases the probability of life there and apparently they are worried that life may be Muslim and have plans to illegally immigrate here to vote Democratic and to enforce Martian Sharia law, which is an equally oppressive but lower gravity version of Sharia law on Earth.

If you can't be bothered to worry about anything Rush says, ever, join the club. As age advances on me, I find I worry less and less about almost everything. This is a medical condition known as "male pattern apathy" and also as a "receding careline." There is no cure. For that I am usually grateful.

As a former altar boy, I know that threatening juveniles before Mass is as time-honored a Catholic tradition as fasting and Holy Water, but the use of firearms to do so is a new wrinkle. Perhaps the priest in question, Father Kevin Carter, was merely over-excited at the just-completed visit of the Pope to nearby Philadelphia and would have waved a gun at anybody he could corner in a spontaneous burst of religious ecstasy, or maybe he was just reminding the lad to keep his outhmay utshay about what happened in the onfessionalcay.

In any case, the weapon he chose to brandish at the disobedient pre-teen was a working replica of a single-shot musket from the Revolutionary War era, reminding us that no matter how many atheists and gays gain entrance to Heaven under the reign of the current Pontiff, the Catholic Church remains at its core old school.

And we had another heartwarming mass shooting, this one at a junior college in Oregon, to which the Presidential Candidate That Nobody Wants, Jeb Bush, reacted by staying "Stuff happens." Really, Jeb, it's okay for me to admit that apathy is the king of emotions, but if you want to be our President, you have to at least pretend to care.

But the man probably can't help himself. You'll recall that his brother said the same thing about Hurricane Katrina.

Predicted the future, died before it could happen. Him and the Mayans both. Losers.

Prestidigitation has always been a popular sport. The foretelling of the future is attempted every day by everyone who buys either stocks or health insurance. There have been famous seers in the past, like Nostradamus, who is said to have predicted many future occurrences, but if you research the guy's actual foretellings, you'll find they are couched in pretty vague terms, so they could apply to just about anything that could happen. Nothing really specific gets envisioned. For example, the Nostra-man never said, "On September 25, 2015, a man named John Boehner, whose name can be comically mispronounced "boner," will resign as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, leaving behind only a note saying 'F*ck all of you,' written on a cocktail napkin."

This is wisdom on the part of that ancient, because the one thing that can be said for certain about the future is that it is unknowable. Nobody can say for sure what will happen in it, but I'm willing to stake my reputation here on predicting things that won't happen, even though many people think they may. Here are twenty of them:

An "I don't care" button for Facebook

The race war

Most porn actresses

Final season of Game of Thrones anytime soon

Capri pants for men

The Trump Administration. Or the Cruz Administration. Or the Christie, Jindal, Paul, Fiorina et al Administrations. Especially the reign of Bush III. None of them. What a bunch of mentally forlorn ass-clowns. It's not even funny anymore.

FEMA death camps

A return to the gold standard

Benevolent aliens

Hostile aliens

Aliens who don't give a crap

Jesus

Something that will replace video games

People stopping telling you their mutt is a "rescue" because they don't want you to think they're too poor to spend a grand on a purebred dog with crippling genetic defects.

Monochrome Skittles

Cell phones that warn you when you ought to look up.

The Grope Cam

The President videoed at the White House chillaxing with a huge fattie.

People finally paying so much attention to Caitlyn Jenner that she shuts up and goes away.

The Keystone XL Pipeline

There you have it. Eat my dust, Nostra-D. You'll notice most of these are timed so that the verity of the foreseeing can be determined in the none-too-distant future. Most of the stuff you predicted was too far ahead for people to see if you were right or not until after you were dead, so you didn't get to be famous for it until then.